Skip to main content

Business Styles

MBA's usually learn about Theory X:Theory Y methods of management. Over the last 3 years in corporate world I have seen similar two opposite styles of business development at work - I christen them "Theory A: Theory B" style of business.

Theory A
A manager who believes that new business is the best business and getting business is his most important priority. Such managers tend to paint a very rosy picture of their company / team / work in front of a new client. They also tend to over-commit. Though not as a rule, but as a corollary, such managers tend to pay very little attention to work (projects / deliverables etc) when its comes to delivery / execution.

Thus they tend to over-commit and under perform, resulting in low repeat business. However, their future pipelines are usually so full of work that they are hardly ever bothered or worried by the lack of repeat business.

Theory B
A manager who believes that repeat business is the best form of business and hence his focus is execution than business development. Their deliverables usually tend to be more than committed and given their focus on delivery, such managers have very good repeat business coming in from their clients.

However, such managers always under-commit many times even allowing opportunities to lapse if the client expects more output than promised. They tend to loose many contracts to aggressive competitors but tend to be little bothered about the same due to the repeat business pipeline that they have.

Conclusion
I have seen, worked for / with and analysed both styles of working and have been till now not able to necessarily side with any one of the above.

Intuitively, Theory B seems to be the more righteous and sustainable - but in the today's times of aggressive competition, one cannot deny the efficacy of Theory A in helping a new business grow. A drawback of Theory B is that it is usually not suitable to grow business in non-traditional areas where you might not have much experience, because the manager will never commit about the new service's/product's ability to deliver and hence may never be able to give the client enough confidence.

At the same time, applying Theory A might wreck havoc for an industry where reputation might be more important than growth and hence again spell doom for the new business initiatives.

Would love to have comments from others on this one ...
.

Comments

  1. very true... and I am (and have been) a part of both sides ... from my point we really need to seek a balance between the Theory A & B and it has to drive down from leadership as it is the leadership that defines the goals for these two types of managers ... a manager has to have both components in his set of goals and needs to align with the other support functions such as availability of resources (execution task force) added with lot of insights about the potential customer in questions. Also, there is something known as account mining - growing deeper with a customer... this something is missed out when the manager type A moves off from a win and delivery is only focussed on to limited execution goals and forgets that there could be more fruits than the low hanging ones ...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree that a balance between the two would be a good idea. However, with regard to Theory A over-committing is never a good way to go.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How will travel industry transform post-Covid

Unlike philosophers, journalists and teenagers, the world of entrepreneurship does not permit the luxury of gazing into a crystal ball to predict the future. An entrepreneur’s world is instead made of MVPs (Minimum Viable Product), A/B Tests, launching products, features or services and gauging / measuring their reception in the market to arrive at verifiable truths which can drive the business forward. Which is why I have never written about my musings or hypothesis about travel industry – we usually either seek customer feedback or launch an MVPised version and gather market feedback. However, with Covid-19 travel bans across the globe, the industry is currently stuck – while a lot of industry reports and journalistic conjectures are out, there’s no definitive answer to the way forward. Besides there is no way to test your hypothesis since even the traveller does not know what they will do when skies open. So, I decided to don my blogger hat and take the luxury of crystal gazing

A Guide to Privacy on Social Media [apps]

The recent announcement by WhatsApp to update its privacy terms - and 'accept or leave the app' stance - led to an exodus of users from Whastapp to competing, privacy-conscious apps such as Telegram or Signal. A week after the exodus began, Whatsapp clarified its stance - and WhatsApp's CEO went about providing a long Twitter clarification . And then, many returned, many who considered moving stayed put on Whatsapp. This post is meant for those who are still sitting on the fence - it clarifies questions like: What is this all about? What do I do? Is Whatsapp safe? I've heard Telegram is Russian - so how is it safer than Whatsapp? I can't move because my business contacts are on Whastapp - how do I secure myself? PS: I've modeled this post based on several conversations I've had with friends and family on this subject, dealing with the chain of questions they ask, then objections they raise, then clarifications they seek - and finally the change resistance

Ekla Chalo re

Watched "Bose- The forgotten Hero" on Saturday. Gem of a movie and probably the best of Shyam Benegal. Subhash Chandra Bose has always been an inspiring character in the history for the youth. This post however is not about the movie, its about the lead song 'Tanha Rahee' which is based on the poem 'Ekla Chalo Re' by Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. I had pasted the English translation of this poem on my blog earlier. http://the-complete-man.blogspot.com/2004/12/tsunami-times_30.html However, yesterday I found the original bengali text of the poem and found that the meaning in the above translation was not exact. So I have endeavourer (with the help of Shubham ) to re-translate it into English and Hindi by myself. Here is the output of my work: Bengali Jodi Tor Dak Soone Keu Na Asse Tobe Ekla Chalo re Ekla Chalo Ekla Chalo Ekla Chalore Jodi Keu Katha Na Kai Ore Ore O Abhaga Jodi Sabai Thake Mukh Firae Sabai Kare Bhay Tabe Paran Khule O Tui Mukh Fute Tor Maner Kath